David Bushby (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I agree that there was no point of order, but Senator Polley made an interesting point in saying that I was misleading the Senate. I indicated that fibre on demand will cost a few thousand dollars. It may be five or six thousand or it may be two or three thousand—we do not know yet. But what I am talking about is our plan to deliver superfast broadband to the premises using fibre to the node. That technology in other countries is delivering 100-megabit downloads and 40-megabit uploads. The technology is improving all the time and the speed is getting faster all the time. In coming years we can expect to actually see much higher download and upload speeds than we are currently seeing in other countries.

The suggestion that Tasmanians or Australians are going to miss out completely, because they are getting fibre to the node, is just not true. The other thing to remember is that, in Korea, Samsung, I think it is, has recently been trialling wireless superfast broadband that delivers one-gigabit downloads over wireless. That is probably not going to be commercially rolled out for a good five years, but it highlights that technology is developing in a way that may well usurp the benefits of delivering fibre to the premise which Senator Whish-Wilson was talking about.

Labor has managed this project incompetently—there is no doubt about that. Their plan would have cost $29 billion more than they had let on and would have increased monthly internet bills by up to 80 per cent, or $43 a month. Crucially, everybody in Tasmania will receive superfast NBN. Our job is to do that sooner and at less cost to the taxpayer. Incorporating technologies into the NBN that can be readily upgraded and are already delivering high-speed broadband to families in other countries will enable us to do just that. We are on course to deliver more NBN connections to Tasmanian homes and businesses this calendar year than over the entire five years since the rollout began. I make this point: since we got into government, we started rolling out fibre to the premise again. That is what we are doing. We will double the number of homes in Tasmania that have fibre to the premise and we will do it in a year when it took you five years.